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1959

When Fred Kaplan, the author and Slate military columnist, told Calvin Trillin that he was writing a book about the year 1959, Trillin (who had been in the Army at the time) replied, “Why are you writing a book about the most boring year of the twentieth century?” It turns out that Kaplan knew what he was doing. You’d be amazed how much stuff was going on in the unpromising year 1959, and how it all comes under the heading of breaking the chains of the old and embracing the new.

Kaplan, who’s a friend of mine, is a poly-enthusiast. He writes books and columns about defense and foreign policy; he reviews high-end stereo equipment; he writes about jazz, a subject on which he’s deeply knowledgeable; he knows all about the latest DVD releases and the technology behind them; he frequents music clubs, art-film screenings, gallery openings, art auctions; he reads contemporary fiction. He and his wife, Brooke Gladstone, are the rare New Yorkers who actually take full advantage of the city’s cultural cornucopia. He’s a sort of wonky hipster, a type that subsumes and coalesces almost all of the characters—physicists, poets, jazz musicians, astronomers—who set America on fire at the end of the Eisenhower decade, and who people “1959,” Kaplan’s new book, which puts all of his passions between hard covers.

The book begins on January 2, 1959, with the Soviet launch of a rocket that broke the earth’s gravitational pull and flew past the moon, which it was intended to hit. This event perfectly embodies Kaplan’s main theme in “1959,” “the year when the shockwaves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when humanity stepped into the cosmos and also commandeered the conception of human life, when the world shrank but the knowledge needed to thrive in it expanded exponentially, when outsiders became insiders, when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled, when everything was changing and everyone knew it—when the world as we now know it began to take form.” The year that rolled out under the shadow of Lunik I brought to public consciousness new art and literary forms (free jazz, New Journalism, previously censored books, art “happenings”), scientific breakthroughs (the microchip, the Pill, the serious search for extraterrestrial life, a new theory of nuclear war), and some of the early tremors of the political earthquake that would be the sixties.

The political chapters in “1959” are a little less convincing to me than the cultural and scientific ones. If you were to look for the year that signalled the coming civil-rights revolution, several others from the same period—1954, 1955, 1960—would be stronger candidates. And while Kennedy’s Presidential campaign, characterized by the phrase “New Frontier,” may have used the language of the Space Age, it did not break out of the straitjacket of the Cold War or truly point the way to the future we’re living today. Politically, America was a few years behind its artists and its scientists, which is the normal pattern in history.

Kaplan had been thinking about writing this book for some time—ever since he noticed that many of his favorite works of art and other interests seemed to fall in the same calendar year. The writer’s sense says that it can’t be coincidence; Kaplan had a hunch that something was up in America, and, now that the book is done and has been published, he turns out to have been completely right. This shows that, simply by following your pleasures and obsessions to their source, you can reveal history in a new and unexpected light. And if you write as well as Kaplan does, you can make of your enthusiasms immensely enjoyable reading. There’s a particular satisfaction in seeing someone turn what he’s already been doing or reading or watching or listening to most nights of his life into a first-rate book.